4 ms·

Solaris is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. The way the planet behaved felt as palpably real as it was mysterious. It made me feel that it's a good th

Solaris is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. The way the planet behaved felt as palpably real as it was mysterious. It made me feel that it's a good thing that the cosmos is more complicated and can't just be divided into what's known and what's not yet known. Thank goodness for the unknowable.

goatlover 8y ago
It really was. Lem made a good point about how most scifi treats aliens either as humanoid versions of ourselves, or creatures from our nightmares. After Star Trek Next Generation introduced the Borg, they found they needed to humanize them by having a Borg Queen individual. The 2002 movie version had Gibarian's recording say that our enthusiasm for exploration is a sham. We're looking for mirrors. The point of Solaris was that the alien was not at all like us, and therefore humans couldn't understand it, because we're too busy projecting onto it. And Solaris used that to create disturbing human analogs, because it didn't understand either.